In April, Grayscale Investments, the subsidiary company of Digital Currency Group, released the Ethereum Classic Investment Trust in a regulated stock market to provide professional traders and institutional investors a secure and robust method of investing in Ethereum Classic. Prior to the ETC fund, Grayscale Investments also released the Bitcoin Investment Trust, which also helped investors in the public market to invest in bitcoin through secure channels.
At the time of the launch, Silbert stated:
“We’re excited about ethereum classic, as opposed to ethereum (ETH), because ETC has a fixed supply and the potential to serve as the smart contract and micropayment layer to the Internet of Things.”
Since then, the demand for Ethereum Classic in the stock market has been increasing at a rapid rate and within five months, Ethereum Classic Investment Trust evolved into a major investment vehicle for the ETC market, holding more than $53 million in ETC.
Ethereum Classic is appealing to a wide range of investors in the stock and public markets due to its fixed monetary supply that is similar to bitcoin. Over the past few years, analysts have explained that bitcoin’s value will likely rise to over $100,000 if and when the 21 million supply of bitcoin is maximized. Although the traditional Ethereum network has an inflationary supply which produces more Ether at a constant rate, Ethereum Classic adopted the monetary policy of bitcoin earlier this year.
The Ethereum Classic foundation along with Arvicco, the pioneer of the ETC movement, emphasized the necessity of rarity and scarcity for investors in the market. Arvicco wrote:
“Platform token is a critical part of blockchain system that aligns economic incentives of key stakeholders, users, developers, investors, and miners. Its monetization makes everything tick and helps to bootstrap the ecosystem. However, it has been shown time and again in economic history that reliable long-term monetization is impossible without two key characteristics; utility and scarcity.”
Since the monetary policy change and hard fork led by the Ethereum Classic foundation, the demand for the cryptocurrency has risen and investors have started to acknowledge ETC as a long-term investment and as a safe haven asset. Like bitcoin, its decentralized nature allows ETC to become immune to global markets volatility.
As of current, only bitcoin and Ethereum Classic have provided infrastructure for institutional and large-scale investors. The majority of Ethereum’s $800 million daily trading volume derives from the Chinese and South Korean cryptocurrency exchange markets because it lacks infrastructure for institutional investors.
Some cryptocurrency exchanges that support Ethereum such as Coinbase’s GDAX announced that they are planning to focus on optimizing trading ecosystem for institutional investors in the near future. In upcoming months, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic and bitcoin will see drastic increase in liquidity as a result.
Source: Old BitConnect website, was owned by another entity
